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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

This has been really interesting to me. I've been learning Spanish for a while and will mix un poco español en my sentences with ChatGPT all the time, and it's cool to see the same thing reflected back to me. It's not uncommon for a response to be 75% in English with 25% Spanish at the beginnings and ends especially. All of my conversation titles are in Spanish because I always start them with "Hola", so whatever model sets the title just assumes Spanish for it, regardless of what the rest of the message is.

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I was on a vacation in the last week and was waiting at a restaurant for a while. The lady behind me was seemingly switching between english and spanish every few sentences which caught my attention. I can only assume the person on the other side was a bilingual also. Someone in their family had a medical emergency and was in the hospital. What's interesting is it seemed like the sentences talking about medical stuff were in very good english, and the spanish sentences were about other things (I can't interpret very fast at all). With the speed and fluency of their conversation it seemed like there was not any cost on their part using either language.

I am bilingual.

My phrases switch to the language I learned them on very easily.

Computer terms are almost always English.

A lot of idioms I learned in my adult life are going to stay English, even if a Turkish equivalent exists and I later learned about them.

I am bilingual as well, my children are trilingual.

I find out that it is way easier for me to translate to or from English (not a native speaker) to any of the languages I am bilingual in, than between these languages. It is very hard for me to listen to one, and speak the other.

I struggle to fluently translate childrens books from English to Turkish, but it wouldn't be too hard to do Turkish to English, I imagine. There would be loss of some nuance, but general meaning would transfer.

In my case this is more some kind of compartmentalization. When I speak on of my two languages, I can translate to English because English is a learned one. Same if I want to translate to German (that I speak just a tiny bit). It doesn't work that well between them.

I can of course fluently translate but the words are not going to be really great. I cannot really understand this.

I spent a good time in the middle east and loved to listen to my friends arguing in Arabic.

To my French ear or sounded like they were sentencing me to terrible things (and were always surprised they sounded like this :)), up until the random "router" or "framework" which was the core of the fight.

I love to listen to languages I do not understand (a great source is Radio Green) and try to get from the words what they are talking about.

Another one is one of my closest friend, a German, who speaks a very soft English. This until he described me how to drive somewhere (pre-GPS era) and the names he was using were like lashes.

Speaking various languages is a blessing

Language is incredibly interesting to me. Especially when it’s blended or becomes its own pidgin dialect. Multilingual societies are fascinating.

I’m so glad I am not the only one that does this!

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